Knee Deep in the Apocalypse

The caveat: This may be the most important Post I have ever entered into the Transcendence Diaries in its ten year history. There. I said it. [If you want to skip all the literary mumbo jumbo and just get to the nitty gritty of this all important post, then just jump all the way down as far as you can go and read up instead of down. If you enjoy a good introductory set up with your stories, then continue from here]. So let us begin. I know what you're thinking. Well, at least I know what I'm thinking. So let me take that back about what I know or don't know about YOU. But... to me at least, Knee Deep in the Apocalypse was and still is meant to be the title of the next Ed Hale and The Transcendence album. So why then is it being used as the heading of a Transcendence Diaries entry? The answer is simple; and yet not something that I feel encouraged or even comfortable to write about. In fact my hands are shaking slightly as I type these very words we are both now reading.

It happened approximately forty-five minutes ago. We sat down to eat our dinner, and on this rare occasion decided to do so in the media room just so I could watch the Evening News. Princess Little Tree truly is a saint, despite not being recognized as such by the Pope. When I say watch the Evening News I'm not talking about sitting down to watch our favorite channel's news show, as in making a choice to watch either CBS or NBC or CNN et al. I watch them all. Simultaneously. Yep. It's true. Some are live. And some have been taped. (I DVR all of them. Every night. And every day. And then I delete them all. Only to turn around and do the same thing the following day. I know, it must sound twisted. But go with me here for a bit longer...)

Obviously the PBS News Hour is my preferred "favorite"; but in the span of an hour I will take in at least six to nine others. Six to nine different Evening News Hours all at once each and every evening. It's what I do. A method I developed many years ago. It's also just part of my "job;" if you can call "rockstar" a job then you're far more generous than I am. But God bless PLT -- she accepts the fact that we will be bombarded with story after repeated story after repeated story in my quest to "get the big picture;"  slamming down evening news shows like a drunkard slamming shots of cheap scotch after a fall off the wagon.

I look at it this way. If you're going to watch FOX News then you have to watch MSNBC News. The only possible way that FOX News is ever going to come close to being "Fair and Balanced" is if one watches MSNBC at the exact same time. And vice versa. Put them together and you have a Fatboy Slim style mash up of the best and worst of far right and left partisan viewpoints. Meaning that somewhere in between the two lies the unbiased truth. And let us allow that using the word "News" here in this context is obviously more than generous, because let's face it: neither FOX nor MSNBC have ever really been "news" channels). Watching MSNBC without watching FOX is just as bad as the crusty old rocking chairs who only watch FOX. And of course the same goes for the necessity to watch the three Major Network News shows AND Amy Goodman's "Democracy Now" for the same very reason. If one ONLY watches Democracy Now, they are going to get one hell of liberally skewed and biased view of the world, albeit a more compassionate one than FOX or most others for sure. But still, my goal is not to become aligned or indoctrinated by any one point of view or another. My goal is to observe ALL points of view so as to get a better understanding of where humanity as a whole is headed.


I couldn't care less about feeling aligned with any one point of view; (especially when one considers how tiny tiny tiny our world view is from the small hill top called the United States -- even smaller still from a cosmological perspective. Dig?) So we also throw CNN's Wolf Blitzer in there each night (and yes he annoys us every bit as much as he seems to annoy everyone else on planet earth, which does make you wonder "why and how do they keep him in that coveted spot then? But "liking the anchor" is not one of my prerequisites for taking in news. So too do we watch France 24, the BBC World News, Notizia Italia and Inside the Middle East.

With that said, this evening as we were watching as we always do, something terribly eerie happened. In that precise moment we were watching CBS. Nora Somebody was the anchor this particular evening. And she was reporting on the Dow Jones rally that took place today. Up over 770 points. Just a minute or two was dedicated to the old hat trick of "let's ask an expert on our panel" -- a gimmick adopted by the Major Networks in their attempt to compete with the racier Cable News Shows. And quite frankly a very unwelcome one at that. I personally miss the old days when news was news and not reality TV styled entertainment. I mean let us just for a minute ask ourselves "what on earth is Rachel Maddow?!?! Or Lawrence O'Donnel (sp?) (No I really don't care enough to verify if I spelled his name right. It just isn't important). But seriously. Who ARE these people? And what in bloody hell do they think they are doing?

Since when did the American people decide that it was OK to turn news reporting into a circus of volleying partisan politic opinions? But nonetheless now even the major networks are jumping in the game. If you can fit into a suit, manage to smile for a brief second or two, have absolutely nothing better to do with your life than sit at a desk for five minutes in hopes you'll be asked a question or two, then you're a good enough "expert" to take a seat at one of these tables and espouse your latest idea of the moment, regardless of your lack of knowledge or expertise. That just isn't an issue anymore it seems. So again, like many in our great Nation State, I sorely miss good old fashion news reporting devoid of agenda and/or opinion. Hence PBS News Hour being the last man standing when it comes to unbiased new reporting here in the United States.

So there we were. Nora reporting on the Dow Jones Industrial Average jumping up a whopping 770 points. The so called expert in the white suit spoke eagerly about "the reasons for the jump" (optimism about the Euro Zone possibly getting their shit together economically) as if it were really that easy to call the Market. (if it were, then we'd all be gazillionaires wouldn't we? So so much for anyone with half a brain believing this malarkey). But it was precisely THAT that caused this eerie sense of panic within me.

[Explanation Break: Just in case you are new to the Transcendence Diaries, or even if you're not, but have just forgotten this little known but ridiculously hard to fully fathom fact (forgive the alliteration -- I assure you it was unintentional). Get ready to choke on your Kool-Aid. For my entire life I have had a strange habit of "getting hits" as I call them, or "visions" if you will, that for ease of understanding could probably best be described as "psychic premonitions." Before you go choking to death from disbelief, disgust, shock or laughter, just trust me when I say that I spent the majority of my life in complete denial of this tendency. Yes I thought it odd, to say the least. And no I never considered myself "psychic." Not until the year 2009 that is. This should really be relegated to its own blog post, where I believe that more story would be beneficial. So let me try to sum it up as neatly and quickly as I possibly can, trusting that if interested you can do a search at another moment in time to learn more about this subject and how it came to be. Summarily speaking, in 2009 the twentieth or thirtieth (at least) psychic uttered the same exact words to me that I had been hearing all my life, that is: "You do know that you're psychic don't you?" Normally my pat response had always been to go silent and think to myself "Oh great, another one... If I were so psychic why on earth would I be speaking to you?" But this one got to me. She actually explained the phenomenon to me. And did so in a way that I found myself actually believing her. It didn't hurt that she also suggested a series of exercises for me to do every day in order to more readily tune into and perfect my gift/skill. Which I proceeded to do religiously. For months actually. Eventually I didn't need the exercises. I got it. It was as simple as recognizing that out of the eight Modes of Consciousness [see the site www.avatarepc.com for more on these ideas...], with Intuitive Mode being one of them, all of us are gifted with being more adept at one or two of these Modes more than the others; and for whatever reason I just happened to be very easily able to connect with my intuition more than most others, and for better or worse, I could connect with my intuition easier than I could with any of the other Modes of Consciousness. Bad for me if I need to "think" for example, because "thinking" is another Mode of Consciousness obviously. But that's not the point. The point is that once I had accepted this skill, a skill no different than any other I might add, such as surfing or knitting or picking hot stocks for example, I became better and better at being able to discern when I was getting "a psychic hit or premonition", and when what I was hearing or feeling was just "mind chatter." If you practice it you too can master it. Anyone can. The key to understanding this phenomenon is to understand that it isn't a phenomenon at all. It simply is a fact of human nature that we have yet to fully acknowledge in our evolution as a species. Hence the suspicion and skepticism most feel when they hear of such things. But as more and more of us are beginning to understand, I have come to fully accept this skill, some call it a "gift" -- I am not sure if that is an accurate label for it since I believe that all humans possess just as all humans possess the skill of being able to "cook" and therefore I find it hard to classify such things as "gifts." Being born 6'8" and being badass on the basketball court I would assert is more of a "gift" than being able to tap into your intuition in a manner that appears to be "psychic" to the outside world. Get it? For the last two and half years I have become so accustomed to accepting that there is a profound difference between intuition and mind chatter, and that these intuitive hits that I "get" are real and should be trusted, that my family and friends and I now take it for granted when I get one. We listen. We take them seriously. We do not ignore them or shrug them off as some people would. They have proven to be too accurate too often for us to dismiss them any longer. So there it is. End of Explanation Break]

As we watched this moment in the CBS News I got a chill all through my body. I turned my head slightly to the left and cocked it slightly down and rightward. As I always do when I'm trying to listen to or feel into just what exactly I am being told or hearing. Believe it or not, this helps. It is as if you are trying to hear a sound that is very very far away and hence trying to increase your concentration on just that sound alone. Princess Little Tree is my wife. She has been for over a year now. Before that she was my best friend for over nine years. So she is quite used to seeing this and knowing that I am "hearing" or "feeling" something that is "not right in front of us" so to speak. (Yes you could say that I "hear voices" -- except that I don't really "hear voices" -- it is more like I "hear thoughts or ideas."And yes my mind kicks in immediately sometimes and begins to argue with what I am hearing just as any rational person would. But I am slowly getting better and better at not letting my "thinking" get in the way of what I am "being told" or "hearing"). So Princess Little Tree asked me, "Honey, what is it?" She knows the look. She knows the signs by how I start to move my head and the look on my face.

I felt a profound sense of fear, sadness and panic swelling up in me. But I did my best to control it. My higher self was hearing something. My human self was reacting to it. That is perfectly normal. "My God... babe... I'm not quite sure how to explain it. It's not like usual... this one... it's hard to find the words..." She continued to look at me. Waiting for more.... As she was doing that, we continued to watch the news. Riots in Egypt. Riots in New York. And Seattle. And out and out murder and war in the streets of Libya. These images exacerbated the feeling; and the understanding of what I was feeling. "Honey it's not good..." I said, holding back an emotional reaction that was welling up inside of me that was nearly uncontrollable, "it's not good at all...." My face began to contort the way they do when we are close to tears.

"What is it honey?" she asked. "I'm not sure how to say it in words babe..." I replied. "I'm trying... it happened when that lady was talking to that man in the white suit about the stock market... it's as if I could see through it... I know that doesn't make any sense... but it was as if I were seeing ... wow... it's happening still.... even now as we're watching this" I pointed to the TV. The TV was still on but we had muted it. But we were still watching and even the commercials were eliciting the same idea in my intuition.... "OK well try. Try to explain it," PLT replied.

"Well, it's like I am seeing THROUGH what we are watching right now..." I stated quietly so as not to lose the message, my head still tilted, "do you know what I mean? Oh my God, I got it... honey.... it's just like when we are at the movies! It's as if I am seeing this stuff on TV right now from the future and the future is awful and all these people talking and doing all these things on the TV don't yet know it's awful but we do because we're in the movie theater and we have a semi-good idea of what this movie is about already... it's just like THAT... do you know what I mean?" I asked. "We bought our tickets and know what's going to happen in the movie is not good, but this is the very beginning of the movie where the writer and director are kind of setting us up for the big catastrophe so they don't just start the whole movie in the middle of the major plot. But the major plot here is real. This isn't a movie. This is reality.," I said.

"So what are you saying?" PLT asked. "What I'm saying is that I think we're on the verge of a major world catastrophe and nobody knows it. It's as if.... it's as if we are on the verge of some major transformation, like a mass cleansing... but it's going to get real ugly before it gets better.... God honey, I don't want to say this... I don't even want to think about it... but if I don't I would be totally sabotaging us, just out of fear. So look, let's just remember today. Let's just remember that today I said this. OK? So when it happens we remember... we have a record of it..."

"No. Absolutely not. What's the sense in that? I don't want to just "have a record of that" as you say! I want to know exactly what you're saying. So we can take the right actions. Like we always do," she said.
"OK fine. Honey we need to collect all our cash. We need to get all the cash we have access to or saved or stored away and we need to get it here, in our own possession. Something bad is going to happen. Something we aren't seeing yet. Something that has to do with money... or... no, maybe not, but something that is going to affect all of us financially. I'm not sure what exactly it is... but we're all going to need money. As if we aren't going to have access to our own money even though it's ours if it's being held in stocks or bonds or in a bank or other investments... we need to have it in our possession. Soon. Like now. Before it's too late. And we also need to get out of New York... not because something bad is going to happen to New York...I'm not saying that. It's more just the cost of us having two homes. It's too much money to spend... we need to conserve our cash reserves as much as possible. And our apartment in New York is expensive."

Princess Little Tree replied back "Perhaps this is why we are having such a problem renewing the lease there?!" "Yes. That's exactly why we are having such a problem renewing that lease. I've known it for a few weeks..."
"Why didn't you tell me this?!" she exclaimed. "Because honey, my head gets in the way and starts rationalizing and saying 'don't be ridiculous. We NEED an apartment in New York. It's where we LIVE!"
"But Babyjoon, how many times have we promised ourselves that we would never again question your intuition?!? Why do you do this? Why do you tell us that we can never doubt or not act on your intuition again after you're proven right and then turn around and tell me that we shouldn't listen to what it's saying about the apartment in New York?!"
"Well... because... I like living in New York. It's where I live. I love it there. My whole life is there. And besides, what if I'm wrong?" I said.
"Honey you're only saying that because you want to stay there. But you're right. It costs us as much to live there than it does here. And what you're saying is true, then we should act on it. And we should do so before we renew the lease for another year," PLT said.
"I know. I can see that. Perhaps we can still keep it. Perhaps we need to do both. We need to start...." PLT cut me off. "...we need to tighten our belts fast and start conserving our money. I feel it too now. Whew! I just got chills all over my body. I can feel what you are saying..."

"Yeah, you see what I mean? The next fourteen months are going to be insane. This election... and the fact that BOTH sides of the fence are now in the streets.... it's not just the radical hippies occupying Wall Street... the teabaggers have been marching in the streets for over a year now. BOTH sides are in the streets. But this isn't Tunisia or Egypt. The American people don't stand a chance of creating a revolution here. The government here is brutal compared to those countries. We aren't going to topple our government here. Have you seen how the United States government treats protesters here? They're full on storm troopers armed and dangerous. They attack us and beat the crap out of us and shoot us with mace, smoke bombs and rubber bullets. It's brutal. They've been doing it to us since the sixties. This government is not going down without a fight. And if we the people DO decide to fight, the government is going to beat the hell out of us and throw us all in jail. There isn't going to be any "American Spring" here. You know what I mean?"

"I've seen your photos on your website. i don't know how you put up with it. It's awful. It reminds me of being a girl in Iran. I used to come home crying everyday from college after watching the military beat the protestors with batons and sticks. I was always so frightened. That's why my parents sent me here," she said, shedding a tear.

"Well welcome to Iran part two princess. Because it doesn't appear that this administration is going to act anything like Obama promised during his campaign. He campaigned as "the peace president" and he's been more militarily aggressive than George Bush in the last two years! He's using drones now to attack four or five different countries at once now, and all the while pretending to be a peace loving president. Besides the fact that he's also not going to enact any real financial or economic reform to satisfy the People's requests for all this Wall Street cronyism to end. His whole cabinet is comprised of Wall Streeters."
"I know..." PLT said.

"In other words, Obama is not going to give us the hope that we all had the audacity to imagine for a few brief moments before his election. Instead he's going to keep everything the same no matter how many people of either side take to the streets. And if they don't like that we're taking to the streets, they're just going to hose us down and spray mace in our faces and shoot us with rubber bullets and arrest us and cart us off to jail. We don't stand a chance. We haven't since the sixties. And that's the thing princess... people today don't care. They're not going to stop "occupying"... no one is going to stop protesting or marching or demonstrating... the system is too foul now... it's too screwed up and crooked. And because of how easy it is to access information now, the American people can see it. And they want to change it. But the powers that be have no intention of changing anything. We're going to end up if we're not careful in another civil war.. but this time it's going to be the People versus the Government. And that doesn't even take into account what is happening all over the world with this guy bombing little towns all over the Middle East with these drones. There is just no way that the people who live in these other countries that we are constantly attacking are going to sit around and take it. Eventually they are going to find a way to strike back. And that's what I think I'm feeling... One attack, one disaster, one major catastrophe and they freeze the banks... and the only people who are going to make it are the people who are sitting on major reserves of cash on hand. NOT in the bank. You see what I mean?"

"Yes I do..." and off she went toward the kitchen to attend to more maternal matters. I sat for a while.... in the same position... feeling it... seeing it... but mainly feeling it... "You're going to be OK Fishy," I heard in my head. "But just do what I said. Do what you said. If you follow your intuition and act on it, you all will be ok..." I heard it loud and clear. And I felt comforted. But still nervous.

So up to my office I walked to make this note. For myself and others. Today is October 10th, 2011. As many other dates prior have shown in these Diaries, this is a record of the times. And a record of things to come. Let us pay attention. And start the process of protecting ourselves and our families as quickly as we can. I don't see things getting better. I am sorry to say. In fact I believe we are at the very beginning of things becoming much worse... knee deep in the Apocalypse but we just don't know it yet. It's only deeper that we go from here. May I be eternally wrong.